Nonsense syllable speech materials are often used when investigating speech perception in quiet and
under adverse conditions. The main advantage of using nonsense syllables over words and sentences
is that the acoustic as well as the linguistic context is minimal. This paper presents three anechoic
recordings of 13 male and 13 female native talkers of Danish each speaking 65 nonsense syllables
repeated three times with the neutral intonation contour for Danish (in total 15210 syllables). The
authors compared and ranked groups of three recordings. These three recording had the same talker
and had identical phonetic content. The syllables were ranked according to the general “appropriateness”
and consistency, i.e., prototypical production of the consonant-vowel (CV) with respect to
applicability in speech perceptual studies. The results were compared to results of an automatic
method based on acoustic measures. The two novel ideas are 1) to devise an automated method for
evaluating “appropriateness” of CVs and 2) to develop a Danish CV-material annotated with an objective
measure of “appropriateness” for each recorded CV. The latter would potentially render more
CV’s appropriate for perceptual studies. Moreover, objective evaluation would make it possible to
examine any perceptual effects of variability in CV production (for example how susceptible different
renderings by the same talker of CV’s are to background noise). To the knowledge of the authors, no
such material has yet been published for any language.

One of the aims of the Eye-to-IT project (FP6 IST 517590) is to integrate
keyboard logging and eye-tracking data to study and anticipate the behaviour
of human translators. This so-called User-Activity Data (UAD) would
make it possible to empirically ground cognitive models and to validate hypotheses
of human processing concepts in the data. In order to thoroughly ground a
cognitive model of the user in empirical observation, two conditions must be met
as a minimum. All UAD data must be fully synchronised so that data relate to
a common construct. Secondly, data must be represented in a queryable form so
that large volumes of data can be analysed electronically.
Two programs have evolved in the Eye-to-IT project: TRANSLOG is designed
to register and replay keyboard logging data, while GWM is a tool to record and
replay eye-movement data. This paper reports on an attempt to synchronise and
integrate the representations of both software components so that sequences of
keyboard and eye-movement data can be retrieved and their interaction studied.
The outcome of this effort would be the possibility to correlate eye- and keyboard
activities of translators (the user model) with properties of the source and target
texts and thus to uncover dependencies in the UAD.

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A firm level perspecitve on internal learning and organisational behaviour

Granerud, Lise(København, 2003)

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Abstract:

The auto-components industry has improved its performance significantly in South Africa during the second half of the 1990’s. However, it has not yet reached the level of the international competitors. The present paper suggests that a focus on the firms’ internal conditions is a way to identify obstacles preventing further improvement of performance and competitiveness. Organisational behaviour has increasingly become important internationally in the understanding of firm development and learning in the recent years. This paper argues that it is crucial to take into account the behaviour of the organisation in the perception of the problems connected to the development of technology and capabilities in South African SMEs. The paper builds on the immediate findings of a qualitative case study on technological learning in two auto-components enterprises in Greater Durban, where the organisational behaviour in different ways hinders internal learning. These findings are contrasted with a third firm within the metal sector, which has a very different learning environment. The paper emphasises the importance of including the informal organisational behaviour in the understanding of how to develop the technological resources. The study investigates the physical resources, and the human and organisational resources, and relates these to the routines in the organisational behaviour, including formal and informal work practices and social relations at the shop floor in the understanding of what influence technological learning in these firms.

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The analysis in this paper concerns how national institutions impact the implementation of occupational healthy and safety management systems (OHSMS) in different types of market economies. The main objective is to show how variation in national institutional frameworks influences the implementation of OHSMS, and thus, relative performance. There are two main conclusions. First, dominating organisational templates and co-operative industrial relations structures allow firms from coordinated market economies (CME) to more effectively implement OHSMS than those from liberal market economies (LME) which are embedded in adversarial industrial relations. Secondly, due to differences in the institutional framework among countries, the mechanisms of enforcement for OHSMS need to be designed in different ways. The article contributes to the literature by showing that the implementation and functioning of OHSMS are mediated by the different institutional logics in which firms are embedded.

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While the extant literature on offshore outsourcing deals with this operation mode in
isolation, and typically with a focus on cost effects, we address the broader question of
how companies choose and use outsourcing as part of foreign operation mode
development and as a contributor to internationalization. We use a case study of the
Danish company SimCorp and the development of its operations in Kiev, Ukraine, to
show how learning in various forms, control concerns, and relations with foreign partners
may interact and build momentum for mode change. SimCorp’s experience demonstrates
that outsourcing can be used proactively to promote expanded international operations.

This PhD thesis addresses one of the most intensely debated phenomena over the past decade within
the realm of international business: Firms’ relocation of value chain activities to other parts in the
network of multinational corporation (MNC) or to external suppliers/services providers in foreign
countries (hereinafter referred to as offshoring), often to destination countries with lower cost
structures. Whereas the offshoring of manufacturing tasks has existed for several decades, and has
been analyzed in the international business literature, the offshoring of advanced services tasks from
developed country firms to destination countries such as India, which offer an attractive cocktail of
low costs and highly skilled labour, is a more recent phenomenon. The offshoring of this type of
services tasks forms the subject of this PhD thesis...

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English summary: The paper analyzes the Danish university system,
using a property rights/organizational economics approach. Particular
attention is devoted the complicated agency problem in the system. The
paper recommends more differentiation of pay structures within the
system, more use of tournaments, less multi-tasking, and more use of
precise and objective measures of output performance.
Key words: Economic organization of universities, decision rights, agency problem.

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We describe the background and the basic funding mechanisms for the type of adjustable rate mortgage
loans that were introduced in the Danish market in 1996. Each loan is funded separately by tap issuing
pass-through mortgage bonds ("strict balance principle"). The novelty is a funding mechanism that uses
a roll-over strategy, where long term loans are funded by sequentially issuing short term pass-through
bonds, and the first issuer of these loans obtained a patent on the funding principles in 1999. Publicly
available descriptions of the principles leave an impression of very complicated numerical algorithms.
The algorithms described here show that the essentials can be reduced to a "back of an envelope" complexity.
Keywords: Adjustable rate mortgages, balance principle, patent, yield curve riding

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This paper examines some typological differences in the discourse structure of Italian and Danish. The results of the study indicate that there are significant differences in information packing in the two languages, especially in their use of deverbalisation. Italian sentences tend to include a larger number of Elementary Discourse Units (EDUs), especially propositions, than Danish. A higher percentage of these is rhetorically backgrounded by means of non-finite and nominalised predicates. Danish text structure, on the other hand, is more informationally linear and characteristic of a higher number of finite verbs and topic shifts. The study also suggests that a more fine-grained classification of non-finite and nominalised EDUs is needed for a complete in-depth analysis of discourse constraints in different language families.